This is the sixth post in (the first annual?) Short Week at freddiedeboer.substack.com. Since people constantly complain that my stuff is too long, this week all posts will be 500 words or less. We will return to our usual longwinded ways next week.
I've never seen Fight Club, so I can't comment on it. I have seen American Beauty, though. I would characterize that film as being about a mid-life crisis rather than a reaction to the state of society at a given time. Kevin Spacey's character is a middle-aged guy who has done all the things he was supposed to do -- built a career, gotten married, had a child, bought a house -- and although this is supposed to be more or less the definition of personal fulfillment (according to conventional society), he's miserable. The job sucks, the marriage is dead, his relationship with his daughter is lousy. So he, in effect, tries to get a do-over on his adult life by starting over in adolescence. He gets a job in a fast-food place (standard high-schooler's job), gets the now-30-year-old muscle car he dreamed of when he was young, gets obsessed with a high-school girl, does drugs... and as anyone with any sense would have predicted, it doesn't work, and in fact it just makes things worse.
But think about the circumstances in which the protagonist meets Marla for the first time. Isn't Pahlaniuk telegraphing something here: that authenticity just isn't an option in the society he depicts?
He's a primary example of why Film Twitter became so incredibly fraught after Trump won. Following the election, he stopped the all-caps gimmick. That's fine, but then in the years to come he became extremely, insufferably, unbearably woke. I'm not kidding. It was like someone bottled the very essence of Tumblr and he swallowed the whole thing. Every movie that came out during the Trump years that Woke Twitter hated, he was right there in the trenches. And he writes in an incredibly condescending manner now, as if the entire world can be divided into right-thinking Woke people who like the Morally Correct movies (and TV shows, and videogames), versus the rest of us plebes who might as well be Gamergate (which I'm not; fuck Gamergate). It's revolting, and he and people like him did a real number on me and my mental health.
Forgive me for rambling, but those days were really rough. They nearly killed my love of film.
The two movie controversies that truly messed me up were those of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri and Joker. I felt like I was losing my mind for liking those movies when so much of Woke Fm Twitter thought they were literally harmful and judged the living shit out of anyone for liking them. I felt like I was a bad progressive (and perhaps evena bad person) for wanting those movies to win awards. It wrecked me so bad I ended up going back to therapy.
Things are better now, but this whole phenomenon is still my least favorite thing about the Left-of-center today. It's basically the old Moral Majority, only coming from the other direction. I never saw it coming. Not in a million years.
It blows my mind that anyone could be so overinvested in twitter that it sends them to therapy. There aren't even 300 million users on the platform. The vast majority of humanity agrees with you, they're just smart enough not to waste their time on that video game.
Well, I was that invested, sad to say. For a few years anyway. But I've struggled with depression my whole life so I'm prone to shit like that from time to time.
But my Twitter days are behind me. I'm much more stable IRL now and things are getting better.
Count me in as a lefty who liked Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri and, while not liking Joker, thought the liberal critic outrage over that film utterly hilarious. Every liberal American film critic now views every film as what the filmmaker, personally, believes and wants to happen. Bad people must be portrayed as bad and can't be rewarded. They basically want the Hays Code back.
I've never seen Three Billboards but as far as I can recall it was initially hailed as a masterpiece. I guess the twitter-brained were really pissed at that reception and wanted desperately to change it.
That's exactly what happened. And it's not new. Backlash during Academy Awards season happens all the time. But the emergence of Twitter and the presence of Trump as President created a whole new moral panic. Just watching the fucking Left turn into moral puritans regarding art... I was stunned. I know now that Twitter is not real life, but it felt that way at the time.
Twitter leftists claim to understand privilege. What they fail to understand is that having the knowledge of culture, vocabulary, history, and sociology required to even BE 'woke' takes privilege to begin with! They essentially judge others for not having as much privilege as they do, and they pretend that makes them righteous.
I am increasingly glad with every passing day that I’m not on Twitter, but there is still a sick desire within me for knowledge that I know will hurt to know.
Can I get a TLDR about why people didn’t like Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri?
Its set in a small town in MO. Most of the movie is about a white woman lashing out at the cops for not solving the rape and murder of her daughter. But there's a dim-witted, crooked cop in it as well who allegedly once tortured a Black suspect in custody (this is never shown, just hinted at). Maybe four or five lines of dialogue total are dedicated to race in the whole movie.
Anyway, the bad cop loses his job for throwing an innocent man out a window (white dude this time). He tries to redeem himself by helping the main character solve the murder of her daughter, but he fails.
Woke Twitter basically thinks this is a racist movie because it tries to redeem a bad character and doesn't address race correctly I guess. It's all very confusing to describe to a normie.
FCH's political turn has been a huge bummer. More than just that, I think, jumping to Patreon with all its incentives has really narrowed his focus down to pretty much covering what fans want: Marvel and anime. Couple that with the politics, and most of his recent output is about, like, the transphobia of this Cowboy Bebop episode or the coded racial messaging of Marvel's Captain Falcon.
I don't quite understand the complaint there. Is his complaint about the way the Force works in the fiction, or is his complaint that the fictional bad guys are, gasp, depicted as actually bad people who are doing bad things?
So he's triggered by... fictional depictions of nonexistent superpowers that can be passed by blood transfusion. Well, shit. No one tell him about Spiderman.
I am disappointed but not surprised to hear that FCH has vanished down the social justice rabbit hole.
For a few years, he was my favorite online film writer bar none. From his (viral) Lego Movie analysis to his putting into words exactly why I dislike JJ Abrams he was so, so good at examining a movie from a functional viewpoint; pulling it apart to describe how it had a given effect and why. I started to fall out of love around the time of Joker, and gave up on him completely when he got a YouTube channel. I think the breaking point for me was his writing on Into the Spider-Verse, where his (correct) assertion that the movie is brilliant ran face-first into his ACAB framing of Miles' relationship with his dad; the intellectual contortions he got into to frame that movie's views of police as COPS BAD made me feel he wasn't being honest any more and I drifted away.
It's frustrating too because he's a smart guy and even his Joker review twigs to a real issue the movie has, namely that it hits the audience over the head from frame one with how sorry a sack Arthur is, to such a degree that he really has nowhere to go as a character. It's very tonally one-note. But of course FCH framed it through the worry that an audience might come away feeling bad for (a category of white male) person that they shouldn't feel bad for, so it was very off putting.
I just checked out his blog, and damn, you weren't kidding. He hits every note. Describes his own privilege at length, scolds (other) white men who don't get it, invokes intersectionality multiple times... and the whole thing is a furious rant, where he's so worked up that you kind of worry... wow.
I just checked it out and his most recent blog post spends lots of time obsessing about what he believes the "Google Memo Guy" failed at and why he failed. Then he goes on to completely ignore his own advice about logic vs emotion in the next couple pages. Fucking incredible.
I went to high school with James Damore and let me tell you: FCH got everything wrong in his ignorant analysis.
Film Crit Hulk also does his anti "tech bro logic" thing, which I never understood. I always thought the argument against right-wing uses of "logic" and "reason" was that these people aren't actually using logic and reason, just talking about it. I can't believe some people have actually jumped to conclusion of logic and reason being bad.
I can't speak for Damore though, never read the thing.
FCH does pay lip service in that piece to the idea we shouldn't abandon logic and reason, but instead balance them with emotion. Also we should be aware enough of our emotions to tell how they're impacting our logic and reason.
He then goes on to completely ignore his own advice by ignoring how his own emotions are coloring the logic he uses.
I strongly agree that the hand-waving "it's all satire" is always so irritating to me. I'm fine with your take on how this movie is not meant literally, because at least it's not hand-waving. But that hand-waving happens a lot of movies where smart people assure me the movie isn't endorsing the characters -- I think immediately of Wolf of Wall Street -- and I'm a philistine for thinking it does. I don't understand what there is to enjoy on a ironic level. Something like, I dunno, This is Spinal Tap is a satire -- you watch it to laugh AT them. That is definitely not what's happening in Fight Club and Wolf of Wall Street.
Wolf of Wall Street, to me, is a good example of where I don't doubt that the filmmakers wanted to judge the protagonist, but failed in doing so and just made him look cool.
I dunno. I believe the greatest movie ever made is The Godfather, and once when I mentioned that to a guy I didn't know well he said it was a terrible movie because it glorifies the Mafia.
"Wut?"
That had never occurred to me. It hadn't occurred to me that The Godfather was meant to be a realistic depiction of gangsters at all, since I am almost certain gangsters are not as warm and charming and clever and noble as characters like Michael and Vito Corleone. No, The Godfather is a Greek tragedy, an archetypal fantasy, which is why it resonates with audiences.
I honestly never thought it was really supposed to be about the actual Mafia, and am still surprised so many people do.
Wolf of Wall Street is weird. You get three hours of fun rich guy bullshit then a couple scenes where the camera turns on you, the audience, and condemns you for being complicit in praising this rich guy and his bullshit by taking the ride. It's such a strange, condescending move for a story to take. I still love WOWS, though, which is even weirder.
I've run into this a lot in video games and I also don't know how to feel about it.
The ur-example is Spec Ops: The Line, which I consider a masterpiece and re-play every couple of years. But every other video game that tries to go "wow, you sure did kill a lot of people *just like I told you to*, didn't you?" has been unbelievably cringey to me.
I think there's just a very delicate line here between interesting or anvilicious. Or possibly it's a trick that only works once, and Spec Ops happened to be the first game I came across that pulled that trick.
Replace "Spec Ops: The Line" with "Iji" and I can tell the same story. I think it is an only-works-once deal, and every one after feels derivative of that first example.
I absolutely love Spec Ops, but a *lot* of people criticize it in exactly those lines: "Why are you blaming me for following your game, you never gave me any choices!"
I think this is dumb because imo the game is directly criticizing *other games* (and those games similarly lack choice) but a lot of folks take the loading screen stuff like the "do you feel like a hero?" questions very personally and get annoyed that they couldn't choose to make better decisions.
In addition to only working once, this might also just be a time-gated thing, because it was way more common at the time to have games that were just shooting galleries. Nowadays a lot of the people playing Spec Ops for the first time have a lot more variety in mind, as opposed to just an endless array of first person shooters.
I'm curious about what other examples you were thinking of, re: stuff that tries to nail the same idea?
Yeah, and I totally get people who think Spec Ops is manipulative--it is, and it's not even slightly shy about displaying how much contempt it has for the player. Ludonarrative dissonance is a really difficult thing to balance and its impact varies a lot from person to person. For me, I like the way Spec Ops is actively antagonistic to the player for continuing to play it, but I can also see how someone might find it overplayed.
For games that imo failed at this balance...Last of Us 2 was the recent one (and I didn't find the first one that impactful either). I think I remember one of the new Tomb Raider games doing something like this, but I can't remember for sure. I remember both of those games being very manipulative about killing named/important characters in cutscenes while the player character massacres hordes of grunts in gameplay. Dishonored annoyed me badly too: it has a "morality system" where things in the game get worse the more you kill and make bad choices, but the rewards for being good were so trivial and the game went out of its way to make non-lethal combat suck and lethal force awesome.
Funny that you mentioned that Film Crit Hulk analysis of Fight Club, since he pulled an absolute 180 a few years later in making a point about Scorsese's gangster movies: Goodfellas doesn't "glorify" gangsters when it makes them look cool because gangsters *are* cool. They're tough and sly and funny and free of a lot of constraints that make normal life frustrating and humiliating. If you can't acknowledge this on at least some level, your gangster movie just isn't true.
So there's good reason to point out that Fight Club isn't quite satire in the usual sense: Tyler Durden kind of a caricature, but he's also really fucking cool. He's a soap pirate who looks like Brad Pitt and blows up credit card companies. That's cool as shit. He's also an arrogant, amoral manipulator who wrecks lives--that's not cool, and at no point does the movie ask you to ignore that. I don't get why internet debaters can't handle a contradictory character when we've had them since Greek tragedies.
About Fight Club... I love it. Always have. The mind-fuck brand of storytelling has huge appeal for me. Though I never once thought about starring an actual fight club. That's insane.
Yes, agreed, and it's in more than just that scene - the whole film changes when you see it through the lens of men who are afraid of women. When I'm feeling especially saucy, I like to trot out my personal take that Fight Club is actually one of the salient feminist artworks of the last couple decades (plus a year or so). I didn't think so when I first saw it (as an adolescent who was afraid of girls and found the prospect of self-effacing toughness very appealing), but the more I've thought about it since, plus a few more viewings, the more I think the conclusion is impossible to avoid. Instead of reckoning with his own vulnerability, Jack continues to double-down on hypermasculine (to the point of overt homoeroticism that people twisted themselves in knots trying to pretend wasn't there) efforts to self-actualize. The world his split psyche builds is the inversion of his initial misery as a sexless, lifeless drone: the same lack of identity and humanity, except now he's a fascist instead of a consumer.
Note also that Tyler doesn't appear until after Marla - the entry of a feminine avatar for his own desperate urge for authenticity and openness - appears. He's smitten, but he turns away from any chance of romance because their shared deception threatens the remaining layer of security: she knows the dumb name stickers he wears to the support groups are false. Vulnerability appears to be a dead end, so: he invents Tyler.
And the answer? To get in touch with his feminine side - which he does, at the end, to the genuinely positive vision of creative destruction. It's a utopian-feminist masterpiece!
Also note the brilliant editing of the explosion occurring when Marla picks up the phone: as if Jack's psyche is overwhelmed by the prospect of this feminine presence in his life. That Fincher, he's a real one.
What are the chances? I watched Fight Club last night, first time in years. I was expecting it to have aged poorly, but boy was I wrong.
It's very much of its time in certain ways: "We have no Great War. No Great Depression." Yeah? Just wait a few years! And yet the movie is full of the same "losers" we cyclically become aware of and then forget: Dishwashers, petty managers, office slaves, the perennially unemployed... Incels and NEETs, in the parlance of our times.
I don't find discussions about whether something is satire or not particularly interesting... Just not my bag. But along those lines, it is very telling that people don't understand why the movie was so fucking popular with some many people, many of which were neither white nor men! One of my friends was a very angry Taiwanese girl with severe Christian parents, and she worshipped that movie. Life sucks for most people, and this movie captures that quotidian suckiness fairly well. And people whose lives suck rarely want to just wallow in that suckiness---That's for the comfortable arthouse crowd. They also don't necessarily want to make things better, another common fallacy. They want destruction. So the movie shows these losers hurting the people they hate, blowing stuff up, making themselves feared and infamous: A simple atavistic formula that works every time.
Is it "immoral"? Is it "bad"? I don't know, I'm not a priest. I have no way of answering these questions. But some people do think it is indeed "very bad," and honestly that just makes me like the movie more.
I agree with your analysis: it's not at all satire. Satire is laughing in a superior / critical way at something. Fight Club is not at all laughing at its subjects; it's engaging in a fantasy of burning it all down to start over, of the death that results in rebirth, in authenticity, in connection.
No one in Project Mayhem have a name, save in death. Death can make you real. "Jack" shoots himself in the mouth in symbolic suicide to become the person able to greet Marla without pretense or distance. The whole of Project Mayhem is a destructive fantasy about starting over. There is a little bit of amusement in aspects, but it's not typically judgmental amusement. Arguably, the movie is aware of Project Mayhem's absurdity, but it's not ultimately hard on the project, as that project is not really the point of the film. The point is Jack, and Project Mayhem is well in-step with Jack. The movie is not making fun of Jack or Tyler or Marla with a straight face. It's celebrating Jack's rebirth.
Through the whole thing, though, the movie understands this is all fantasy. It's not criticizing the participants for the fantasy because it doesn't pretend that anyone would actually do this. It's as much a fantasy as the action movie with the noble and honorable hero who shoots a lot of bad guys or the romantic comedy where they guy and girl weave back and forth through attraction and rejection that ends with love. It's not pretending to be "reality" even as it comments on the dreariness and artifice of contemporary consumer life and relations. It's supposed to be fun. And it is.
This was fun and helped me with a movie that I always wanted to like but couldn't ever derive anything beyond the cheap superficial stuff ("Bob had bitch tits..."). Also, I just want point out that my informal assessment of "Short Week" is that yes, you've written shorter posts, but there are more of them and I still can't keep up. Gotta say it's fun to subscribe to a writer for whom inspiration comes so naturally and prolifically.
I've never seen Fight Club, so I can't comment on it. I have seen American Beauty, though. I would characterize that film as being about a mid-life crisis rather than a reaction to the state of society at a given time. Kevin Spacey's character is a middle-aged guy who has done all the things he was supposed to do -- built a career, gotten married, had a child, bought a house -- and although this is supposed to be more or less the definition of personal fulfillment (according to conventional society), he's miserable. The job sucks, the marriage is dead, his relationship with his daughter is lousy. So he, in effect, tries to get a do-over on his adult life by starting over in adolescence. He gets a job in a fast-food place (standard high-schooler's job), gets the now-30-year-old muscle car he dreamed of when he was young, gets obsessed with a high-school girl, does drugs... and as anyone with any sense would have predicted, it doesn't work, and in fact it just makes things worse.
But think about the circumstances in which the protagonist meets Marla for the first time. Isn't Pahlaniuk telegraphing something here: that authenticity just isn't an option in the society he depicts?
Palahniuk*
So, about that guy you linked to....
He's a primary example of why Film Twitter became so incredibly fraught after Trump won. Following the election, he stopped the all-caps gimmick. That's fine, but then in the years to come he became extremely, insufferably, unbearably woke. I'm not kidding. It was like someone bottled the very essence of Tumblr and he swallowed the whole thing. Every movie that came out during the Trump years that Woke Twitter hated, he was right there in the trenches. And he writes in an incredibly condescending manner now, as if the entire world can be divided into right-thinking Woke people who like the Morally Correct movies (and TV shows, and videogames), versus the rest of us plebes who might as well be Gamergate (which I'm not; fuck Gamergate). It's revolting, and he and people like him did a real number on me and my mental health.
Forgive me for rambling, but those days were really rough. They nearly killed my love of film.
Yeah not surprising, though unfortunate. But then, you're describing many, many more people than just him. It's a bleak time!
The two movie controversies that truly messed me up were those of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri and Joker. I felt like I was losing my mind for liking those movies when so much of Woke Fm Twitter thought they were literally harmful and judged the living shit out of anyone for liking them. I felt like I was a bad progressive (and perhaps evena bad person) for wanting those movies to win awards. It wrecked me so bad I ended up going back to therapy.
Things are better now, but this whole phenomenon is still my least favorite thing about the Left-of-center today. It's basically the old Moral Majority, only coming from the other direction. I never saw it coming. Not in a million years.
It blows my mind that anyone could be so overinvested in twitter that it sends them to therapy. There aren't even 300 million users on the platform. The vast majority of humanity agrees with you, they're just smart enough not to waste their time on that video game.
Well, I was that invested, sad to say. For a few years anyway. But I've struggled with depression my whole life so I'm prone to shit like that from time to time.
But my Twitter days are behind me. I'm much more stable IRL now and things are getting better.
That's incredible to hear, and it's always amazing to have a real reminder that people can grow and escape. I hope things keep getting better for you!
Count me in as a lefty who liked Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri and, while not liking Joker, thought the liberal critic outrage over that film utterly hilarious. Every liberal American film critic now views every film as what the filmmaker, personally, believes and wants to happen. Bad people must be portrayed as bad and can't be rewarded. They basically want the Hays Code back.
I've never seen Three Billboards but as far as I can recall it was initially hailed as a masterpiece. I guess the twitter-brained were really pissed at that reception and wanted desperately to change it.
That's exactly what happened. And it's not new. Backlash during Academy Awards season happens all the time. But the emergence of Twitter and the presence of Trump as President created a whole new moral panic. Just watching the fucking Left turn into moral puritans regarding art... I was stunned. I know now that Twitter is not real life, but it felt that way at the time.
Twitter leftists claim to understand privilege. What they fail to understand is that having the knowledge of culture, vocabulary, history, and sociology required to even BE 'woke' takes privilege to begin with! They essentially judge others for not having as much privilege as they do, and they pretend that makes them righteous.
> Just watching the fucking Left turn into moral puritans regarding art.
Come to our book club. It’s safe there.
As long ago as The Aviator, mainstream reviewers panned the movie because they thought it wasn't hard enough on Howard Hughes.
It got past hilarious for me when it started seeming like the bluechecks really wanted to meme "Joker mass shooting" into actually happening...
The movie was pretty good, except you might as well watch Taxi Driver.
I am increasingly glad with every passing day that I’m not on Twitter, but there is still a sick desire within me for knowledge that I know will hurt to know.
Can I get a TLDR about why people didn’t like Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri?
Its set in a small town in MO. Most of the movie is about a white woman lashing out at the cops for not solving the rape and murder of her daughter. But there's a dim-witted, crooked cop in it as well who allegedly once tortured a Black suspect in custody (this is never shown, just hinted at). Maybe four or five lines of dialogue total are dedicated to race in the whole movie.
Anyway, the bad cop loses his job for throwing an innocent man out a window (white dude this time). He tries to redeem himself by helping the main character solve the murder of her daughter, but he fails.
Woke Twitter basically thinks this is a racist movie because it tries to redeem a bad character and doesn't address race correctly I guess. It's all very confusing to describe to a normie.
TLDR: people were mad that a racist cop gets a redemption arc.
Yup. My bad, my explanation was too long.
Lol no - I didn’t see yours. I think we posted at the same time.
I should clarify: I don’t actually think he DID get a redemption arc, but some people read it that way and didn’t like it.
FCH's political turn has been a huge bummer. More than just that, I think, jumping to Patreon with all its incentives has really narrowed his focus down to pretty much covering what fans want: Marvel and anime. Couple that with the politics, and most of his recent output is about, like, the transphobia of this Cowboy Bebop episode or the coded racial messaging of Marvel's Captain Falcon.
The wildest recent one was about an episode of The Mandalorian where the bad guys wanted Baby Yoda's blood because of Force sensitivity or something.
FCH went on a melodramatic screed about how this is basically eugenics and therefore SUPER problematic. Like.... wat.
I don't quite understand the complaint there. Is his complaint about the way the Force works in the fiction, or is his complaint that the fictional bad guys are, gasp, depicted as actually bad people who are doing bad things?
See for yourself https://www.patreon.com/posts/44130879
So he's triggered by... fictional depictions of nonexistent superpowers that can be passed by blood transfusion. Well, shit. No one tell him about Spiderman.
Also, that's a /really/ weird operational definition of "eugenics."
I am disappointed but not surprised to hear that FCH has vanished down the social justice rabbit hole.
For a few years, he was my favorite online film writer bar none. From his (viral) Lego Movie analysis to his putting into words exactly why I dislike JJ Abrams he was so, so good at examining a movie from a functional viewpoint; pulling it apart to describe how it had a given effect and why. I started to fall out of love around the time of Joker, and gave up on him completely when he got a YouTube channel. I think the breaking point for me was his writing on Into the Spider-Verse, where his (correct) assertion that the movie is brilliant ran face-first into his ACAB framing of Miles' relationship with his dad; the intellectual contortions he got into to frame that movie's views of police as COPS BAD made me feel he wasn't being honest any more and I drifted away.
It's frustrating too because he's a smart guy and even his Joker review twigs to a real issue the movie has, namely that it hits the audience over the head from frame one with how sorry a sack Arthur is, to such a degree that he really has nowhere to go as a character. It's very tonally one-note. But of course FCH framed it through the worry that an audience might come away feeling bad for (a category of white male) person that they shouldn't feel bad for, so it was very off putting.
Twitter is utterly worthless and I long for the day when dupes will stop playing that shitty video game.
I just checked out his blog, and damn, you weren't kidding. He hits every note. Describes his own privilege at length, scolds (other) white men who don't get it, invokes intersectionality multiple times... and the whole thing is a furious rant, where he's so worked up that you kind of worry... wow.
I just checked it out and his most recent blog post spends lots of time obsessing about what he believes the "Google Memo Guy" failed at and why he failed. Then he goes on to completely ignore his own advice about logic vs emotion in the next couple pages. Fucking incredible.
I went to high school with James Damore and let me tell you: FCH got everything wrong in his ignorant analysis.
Film Crit Hulk also does his anti "tech bro logic" thing, which I never understood. I always thought the argument against right-wing uses of "logic" and "reason" was that these people aren't actually using logic and reason, just talking about it. I can't believe some people have actually jumped to conclusion of logic and reason being bad.
I can't speak for Damore though, never read the thing.
FCH does pay lip service in that piece to the idea we shouldn't abandon logic and reason, but instead balance them with emotion. Also we should be aware enough of our emotions to tell how they're impacting our logic and reason.
He then goes on to completely ignore his own advice by ignoring how his own emotions are coloring the logic he uses.
Damn that sucks. I found the essay interesting but unbearably hard to read so I was happy to see his more recent stuff was missing the gimmick.
I strongly agree that the hand-waving "it's all satire" is always so irritating to me. I'm fine with your take on how this movie is not meant literally, because at least it's not hand-waving. But that hand-waving happens a lot of movies where smart people assure me the movie isn't endorsing the characters -- I think immediately of Wolf of Wall Street -- and I'm a philistine for thinking it does. I don't understand what there is to enjoy on a ironic level. Something like, I dunno, This is Spinal Tap is a satire -- you watch it to laugh AT them. That is definitely not what's happening in Fight Club and Wolf of Wall Street.
Wolf of Wall Street, to me, is a good example of where I don't doubt that the filmmakers wanted to judge the protagonist, but failed in doing so and just made him look cool.
I dunno. I believe the greatest movie ever made is The Godfather, and once when I mentioned that to a guy I didn't know well he said it was a terrible movie because it glorifies the Mafia.
"Wut?"
That had never occurred to me. It hadn't occurred to me that The Godfather was meant to be a realistic depiction of gangsters at all, since I am almost certain gangsters are not as warm and charming and clever and noble as characters like Michael and Vito Corleone. No, The Godfather is a Greek tragedy, an archetypal fantasy, which is why it resonates with audiences.
I honestly never thought it was really supposed to be about the actual Mafia, and am still surprised so many people do.
Wolf of Wall Street is weird. You get three hours of fun rich guy bullshit then a couple scenes where the camera turns on you, the audience, and condemns you for being complicit in praising this rich guy and his bullshit by taking the ride. It's such a strange, condescending move for a story to take. I still love WOWS, though, which is even weirder.
Maybe I'm just lame but I didn't think his life looked cool at all. I'd never want to live like that.
I've run into this a lot in video games and I also don't know how to feel about it.
The ur-example is Spec Ops: The Line, which I consider a masterpiece and re-play every couple of years. But every other video game that tries to go "wow, you sure did kill a lot of people *just like I told you to*, didn't you?" has been unbelievably cringey to me.
I think there's just a very delicate line here between interesting or anvilicious. Or possibly it's a trick that only works once, and Spec Ops happened to be the first game I came across that pulled that trick.
Replace "Spec Ops: The Line" with "Iji" and I can tell the same story. I think it is an only-works-once deal, and every one after feels derivative of that first example.
I absolutely love Spec Ops, but a *lot* of people criticize it in exactly those lines: "Why are you blaming me for following your game, you never gave me any choices!"
I think this is dumb because imo the game is directly criticizing *other games* (and those games similarly lack choice) but a lot of folks take the loading screen stuff like the "do you feel like a hero?" questions very personally and get annoyed that they couldn't choose to make better decisions.
In addition to only working once, this might also just be a time-gated thing, because it was way more common at the time to have games that were just shooting galleries. Nowadays a lot of the people playing Spec Ops for the first time have a lot more variety in mind, as opposed to just an endless array of first person shooters.
I'm curious about what other examples you were thinking of, re: stuff that tries to nail the same idea?
Yeah, and I totally get people who think Spec Ops is manipulative--it is, and it's not even slightly shy about displaying how much contempt it has for the player. Ludonarrative dissonance is a really difficult thing to balance and its impact varies a lot from person to person. For me, I like the way Spec Ops is actively antagonistic to the player for continuing to play it, but I can also see how someone might find it overplayed.
For games that imo failed at this balance...Last of Us 2 was the recent one (and I didn't find the first one that impactful either). I think I remember one of the new Tomb Raider games doing something like this, but I can't remember for sure. I remember both of those games being very manipulative about killing named/important characters in cutscenes while the player character massacres hordes of grunts in gameplay. Dishonored annoyed me badly too: it has a "morality system" where things in the game get worse the more you kill and make bad choices, but the rewards for being good were so trivial and the game went out of its way to make non-lethal combat suck and lethal force awesome.
Funny that you mentioned that Film Crit Hulk analysis of Fight Club, since he pulled an absolute 180 a few years later in making a point about Scorsese's gangster movies: Goodfellas doesn't "glorify" gangsters when it makes them look cool because gangsters *are* cool. They're tough and sly and funny and free of a lot of constraints that make normal life frustrating and humiliating. If you can't acknowledge this on at least some level, your gangster movie just isn't true.
So there's good reason to point out that Fight Club isn't quite satire in the usual sense: Tyler Durden kind of a caricature, but he's also really fucking cool. He's a soap pirate who looks like Brad Pitt and blows up credit card companies. That's cool as shit. He's also an arrogant, amoral manipulator who wrecks lives--that's not cool, and at no point does the movie ask you to ignore that. I don't get why internet debaters can't handle a contradictory character when we've had them since Greek tragedies.
About Fight Club... I love it. Always have. The mind-fuck brand of storytelling has huge appeal for me. Though I never once thought about starring an actual fight club. That's insane.
Yes, agreed, and it's in more than just that scene - the whole film changes when you see it through the lens of men who are afraid of women. When I'm feeling especially saucy, I like to trot out my personal take that Fight Club is actually one of the salient feminist artworks of the last couple decades (plus a year or so). I didn't think so when I first saw it (as an adolescent who was afraid of girls and found the prospect of self-effacing toughness very appealing), but the more I've thought about it since, plus a few more viewings, the more I think the conclusion is impossible to avoid. Instead of reckoning with his own vulnerability, Jack continues to double-down on hypermasculine (to the point of overt homoeroticism that people twisted themselves in knots trying to pretend wasn't there) efforts to self-actualize. The world his split psyche builds is the inversion of his initial misery as a sexless, lifeless drone: the same lack of identity and humanity, except now he's a fascist instead of a consumer.
Note also that Tyler doesn't appear until after Marla - the entry of a feminine avatar for his own desperate urge for authenticity and openness - appears. He's smitten, but he turns away from any chance of romance because their shared deception threatens the remaining layer of security: she knows the dumb name stickers he wears to the support groups are false. Vulnerability appears to be a dead end, so: he invents Tyler.
And the answer? To get in touch with his feminine side - which he does, at the end, to the genuinely positive vision of creative destruction. It's a utopian-feminist masterpiece!
Also note the brilliant editing of the explosion occurring when Marla picks up the phone: as if Jack's psyche is overwhelmed by the prospect of this feminine presence in his life. That Fincher, he's a real one.
What are the chances? I watched Fight Club last night, first time in years. I was expecting it to have aged poorly, but boy was I wrong.
It's very much of its time in certain ways: "We have no Great War. No Great Depression." Yeah? Just wait a few years! And yet the movie is full of the same "losers" we cyclically become aware of and then forget: Dishwashers, petty managers, office slaves, the perennially unemployed... Incels and NEETs, in the parlance of our times.
I don't find discussions about whether something is satire or not particularly interesting... Just not my bag. But along those lines, it is very telling that people don't understand why the movie was so fucking popular with some many people, many of which were neither white nor men! One of my friends was a very angry Taiwanese girl with severe Christian parents, and she worshipped that movie. Life sucks for most people, and this movie captures that quotidian suckiness fairly well. And people whose lives suck rarely want to just wallow in that suckiness---That's for the comfortable arthouse crowd. They also don't necessarily want to make things better, another common fallacy. They want destruction. So the movie shows these losers hurting the people they hate, blowing stuff up, making themselves feared and infamous: A simple atavistic formula that works every time.
Is it "immoral"? Is it "bad"? I don't know, I'm not a priest. I have no way of answering these questions. But some people do think it is indeed "very bad," and honestly that just makes me like the movie more.
I agree with your analysis: it's not at all satire. Satire is laughing in a superior / critical way at something. Fight Club is not at all laughing at its subjects; it's engaging in a fantasy of burning it all down to start over, of the death that results in rebirth, in authenticity, in connection.
No one in Project Mayhem have a name, save in death. Death can make you real. "Jack" shoots himself in the mouth in symbolic suicide to become the person able to greet Marla without pretense or distance. The whole of Project Mayhem is a destructive fantasy about starting over. There is a little bit of amusement in aspects, but it's not typically judgmental amusement. Arguably, the movie is aware of Project Mayhem's absurdity, but it's not ultimately hard on the project, as that project is not really the point of the film. The point is Jack, and Project Mayhem is well in-step with Jack. The movie is not making fun of Jack or Tyler or Marla with a straight face. It's celebrating Jack's rebirth.
Through the whole thing, though, the movie understands this is all fantasy. It's not criticizing the participants for the fantasy because it doesn't pretend that anyone would actually do this. It's as much a fantasy as the action movie with the noble and honorable hero who shoots a lot of bad guys or the romantic comedy where they guy and girl weave back and forth through attraction and rejection that ends with love. It's not pretending to be "reality" even as it comments on the dreariness and artifice of contemporary consumer life and relations. It's supposed to be fun. And it is.
brad pitt eating stuff.
This was fun and helped me with a movie that I always wanted to like but couldn't ever derive anything beyond the cheap superficial stuff ("Bob had bitch tits..."). Also, I just want point out that my informal assessment of "Short Week" is that yes, you've written shorter posts, but there are more of them and I still can't keep up. Gotta say it's fun to subscribe to a writer for whom inspiration comes so naturally and prolifically.
It's a love story! and a lot more.